Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

MLS providers and NAR need to give real estate franchisors a fighting chance.

It's just a flesh wound!

It’s convention season.  Many of your are making the rounds at this year’s real estate franchise trade shows.  Just like you I’ve been to a few already.  I’ve been talking to a lot of other vendors and executives at major franchisors and have begun to better understand some of the issues facing them.  I hit on this a little of this on my post “Inside Trulia’s Boiler Room”.  I can break it down in to 2 different bits:

SEO is a BFD.

Due to the complexities, various display rules, MLS policies and procedures most modern day real estate franchisors contract with a vendor to handle their IDX services.  But a few MLS providers still have rules that require a certain URL structure.  To pass the MLS “smell test”, you must have the broker’s name, such as:

www.abcrealty.bigdaddyfranchisor.com

Well this totally sucks for SEO and long tail search.  I won’t go in to details but  by adding a sub-domain you really hurt the ability for the franchisor to grab any real SEO juice.   And I have to say many MLS provider recognize this and do allow national franchisor sites some leeway, and some do not (I’m looking at you H.A.R.)

After a push last year from  Realogy, NAR’s MLS policy committee changed its policy to allow national franchisors the ability to index IDX listings on their national home pages.  This is a HUGE step in the right direction.  But that brings me to my second point, because they added a certain restriction: No advertising around these listings.

Fighting with one hand tied behind their back.

When you break down Zillow and Trulia’s business model it comes down to two factors:

Great SEO drives traffic.  Traffic equals more dollars from advertising.

Sound familiar? These two things are exactly the same things that many MLS providers and NAR are restricting.  WTF?

The recent restriction by NAR’s MLS Policy Committee to not allow advertising surrounding the indexed IDX listings seems a bit expansive.  Most franchisors and their vendors know there a smart ways of implementing advertising around these listings.  These methods don’t  effect the integrity of the site but do provide much needed revenue.

I think competition is a great thing.  But let’s have a fair fight. MLS providers and NAR need to give real estate franchisors a fighting chance.

VisualTour adds QR codes

Seems QR codes are everywhere these days.  This recent news caught my eye because I thought it was a good pairing of both technologies.  Since VisualTour has virtual tours, a QR Code on the sign would be perfect with the messaging “See What I Look Like Inside!”

New gigs

A couple of industry vets just got new gigs. I failed to mention these guys earlier but as I wait for my plane I thought I would give them a quick shout out.

Jamie Clymer

Jamie Clymer is now General Manager and Vice President of Hotpads. I met Jamie back when he used to run Homes.com. Smart guy.  Most recently he ran Rentals.com.  Good luck to him and his family as they make the move to the west coast.

Brad Bjelke

**********

Brad Bjelke named Executive Vice President of Rapattoni. Looks like things are shoring up at Rapattoni since Nick’s departure. A relative new comer in terms of Rapattoni staff (only there 6 years) it appears he has impressed Niki and Andy enough to take a top spot. I look forward to seeing what the future holds for Rapattoni and congratulate Brad on his new gig.

Keller Williams raises the bar.

I’ve got to hand it to the folks at KW. I was super impressed at the recent 2011 Keller Williams Family Reunion in Anaheim, CA.

To start off with in order to participate in the event you must first compete a Approved Vendor Application. Here’s a list of some of the requirements:

You have to be in business for at least 3 years.
5 letters of recommendation from KW agents using your product.
3 business letters of references
1 letter of reference from you bank.

I would love to see more of this type of vetting in the industry. Although the requirement for being in business for 3 years could be shortened. This might limit their agents to new technology.

Tom
While setting up our booth an announcement went over the PA requesting Vendors to come to demo theatre. At that point Tom Freireich, director of business development for Keller Williams introduced himself and thanked all of for supporting KW and for our business (imagine that!!) Tom told us how many agents were expected (what? no spin? an actual number?) He also invited us to participate in the general session and other events. In fact the show hours were designed to allow this. Tom explained to us that he wanted everyone to particpate and understand their culture. And a quick note about the show hours, the earliest they started was 11AM. So just in case you didn’t listen to me and “went big” the first night you didn’t have to stress to get to the booth at some ungodly hour. Plus you also got a voucher you could use to buy something to eat. Boom!

The inclusive vibe KW set the tone for was a welcome surprise from someone who has attended and paid for a lot of trade shows. To me Keller Williams has set the bar on how to run a trade show and the respect their vendors. Bravo.

Put your listing “in play”.

These guys are worth checking out. And not just because they are sponsoring this month’s Vendor Alley. : )

The name of the service is “N-Play” (http://n-play.com), as the title of this post suggests its a play on the phrase “in play”. In a nutshell the service has a simple way for an online buyer to make an offer (and view other offers) on any listing on a real estate website. The offer is non-binding, anonymous, and the buyer can choose their own agent.

I got a demo of the service from Daniel Fuchs. The process seems easy enough. The buyer answers a series a questions that fills out a grid. Although one thing I think they were a little weak on was choosing your own agent. You basically get a photo on an agent and a short plug they write about themselves. I’d like to see some sort of integration with a peep.ly (now http://socialbios.com/) type service.

You can check out their interactive demo here.

I’ve seen these types of buyer’s marketplace sites before, but N-play has really thought the process thru. I believe the owner has a patent on the process.

One of their key elements is their “Make/View Offers” link/button. These can be placed right on the home page or next to every listing. They have a excleent page where they have mocked-up popular listing portals to show how the implementation would look. Check this out at http://n-play.com/demos/.

So go explore. Their site is full of videos and interactive demos that will allow you to explore.

http://N-Play.com

Cloud CMA Reigns At MRED

You may have read we launched Cloud CMA with MRED yesterday. It was unlike any product launch we ever experienced. We did have a few hiccups but thanks to the MRED staff and our hosting partner, RailsMachine, everything smoothed out after a few tweaks.

Key to the overall success of this was the integration of Cloud CMA with the connectMLS system. The guys at dynaConnections were a pleasure to work with.

We also implemented something new:

When we started W&R Studios one of the big things we wanted to focus upon was transparency with our customers. Transparency is a word that is thrown out a lot these days. To us we wanted to give our MLS customers, real time access to customer metrics. So we created a Dashboard View for our MLS customers that give real time stats to Cloud CMA user metrics. Here’s what a very small bit of that dashboard looks like:

Our customers love it. All of us were amazed at how many members kept activated their account and at the speed they were creating reports.

Here’s a rundown of some of those metrics for yesterday:

  • Over 830 MRED members activated their Cloud CMA account.
  • Over 840 Cloud CMA reports were generated. Here’s the report type breakdown:

About 60% of those were CMAs
16% of those were Buyer Tours
24% were single Property Reports.

  • Over 9,000 property listings were used to create these reports

The user to create a Cloud CMA report the fastest was Mario Russo. He clocked in at 47 seconds. (Think about that, someone who never used the software figured out how to use it in less than one minute. Can you say “easy to use”?)

This morning we already broke 1,000 users activated.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call a hit.

[SOURCE W&R Studios Blog: Lightning|Twice]

Is this the future of listing photos?

OMG!

I’m not sure if this is a new trend or something that I’m just being made aware of, but people are starting to show up in listing photos.  And not just ordinary people, but scantly clad females……in a pillow fights?

Here a are just a few “listing photos” I recently pulled from this agent’s website (not craigslist!):

http://www.yourleaderinluxury.com/properties/index.htm

I wonder if this is going to be brought up at NAR’s next MLS policy committee meeting?  Possibly a new classification,  IDseX?

Thank you.  Thank you.  I’ll be here all night, don’t forget to tip your bartenders and waitresses!

Google selects Realtor.com

This is pretty cool. Google, fresh off their retreat from real estate, has invited Realtor.com for next week’s Mobile World Congress.  Realtor.com’s app was one of only 4 selected for the Android booth.  I’ve haven’t played with their Android app but their iPhone app rocks.

I wonder who are the lucky Realtor.com reps that get to go to Barcelona, where the conference is being held.  At this same conference last year Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7.

Muy bueno Realtor.com!

Read more: Realtor.com Android App featured at Mobile World Congress | REALTOR.com® Blogs

Another nail in the coffin for map search?

I’ve been super busy and haven’t had time to post but thought I would jot down a quick note about Zillow’s decision to switch back to it’s list view from their recent map centric search screen (gusty move and shows that Zillow is not afraid to push the limits but still have the confidence to listen to its customers)

It seems to be a growing trend.  Back in November Seth Siegler (cofounder of Simplistate, an eco-friendly, virtual real estate brokerage) wrote a post on TFOREM titled “Why Map Search Is Dead”.  He had some good points of why map based search is a terrible idea.

Redfin‘s approach is most likely the best I’ve seen, but I’ve never been a big fan on map search UI/UX.

Recently Real Living launched a new national web site and the decision was to also forego the default map screen screen and go right to the list view.

Add to that Google‘s recent decsion to drop real estate listings from Google Maps, and I quote “In part due to low usage,”.

Me thinks me spots a trend.

Purple Rain! Cloud CMA launches with NorthstarMLS

We are all very excited to announce that Cloud CMA is now compatible with NorthstarMLS!

NorthstarMLS serves more than 15,000 REALTORS® in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin.

The NorthstarMLS system conducted more than $11 billion of real estate transaction volume in 2009. We give customers access to more than 48,000 Active listings, more than 1 million comparable and Sold properties, and 2.79 million property records from 87 Minnesota and 3 Wisconsin counties. 

NorthstarMLS is owned and operated by the Regional Multiple Listing Service of Minnesota, Inc. (RMLS) under a mandate to develop and deliver excellence in the technologies, data resources, programs and policies that support our subscribers in the performance of professional real estate practice. 

Many thanks to John Mosey and Tarasoft for helping us get going.

NorthstarMLS subscribers just need to visit http://CloudCMA.com to get started.

[SOURCE LIGHTNING|TWICE]

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